PANS News - Uncategorized

PHARMACIST PIONEERS CLINICAL POSITION FOR NEW MILITARY EXPANDED SCOPE OF PRACTICE

Pharmacist Janet MacMullin works at the Canadian Forces Health Services Centre in Halifax. Formerly employed in the centre’s dispensary, she has spent the last year embedded within the clinic’s primary care delivery units working collaboratively alongside medics, nurses, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and doctors. Her position, a new one, was created locally on a trial basis as a potential example of how the Forces could optimally exercise a newly expanded pharmacist scope of practice.

Pharmacist Lisa Seymour had made the decision to move back home to New Glasgow just three months before her father was diagnosed with a terminal illness. After working in retail pharmacy for a number of years she decided to take advantage of an opportunity that had arose at the Aberdeen hospital. It had turned out to be a fortuitous event because she was able to be there for her father during the end of his life.

Pharmacist Michael MacNeil and Pharmacy Assistant Carly LeBlanc both work at the QEII Health Sciences Centre. Mike is a clinical pharmacist in both general and vascular surgery at the Halifax Infirmary and the Victoria General Hospitals in Halifax. Carly is a pharmacy technician who works in the surgery pre-admission clinic and in the emergency department. If you have ever been admitted for surgery in Halifax, there is a good chance you have met one or both of them.

Pharmacist and Certified Diabetes Educator Stacey Smith greats me in the waiting room at a medical clinic in Spryfield with a big welcoming smile and invites me to join her in her office. If it looks like any other doctor's office you may visit, it is because it is one. She shares the office with a doctor at the clinic. On the desk, there is a computer that gives her access to all the patient file information, including the results of blood tests. Stacey tells me that she has a patient who has agreed to let me sit in on his consultation if I am interested. Of course, I am.

Locals refer to it as Camp Hill Hospital, but its actual name is Camp Hill Veterans Memorial Building and it is a long term care facility whose current population includes veterans of World War II and the Korean War. It is home to 175 veterans, mostly men. The average age of a resident at Camp Hill is 92.

Dynamic Duo: Meet the Renal Care Pharmacists Making a Difference at the Nova Scotia Health Authority

There is an unmistakable energy that radiates from pharmacists Jaclyn Tran and Jo-Anne Wilson as they talk about their work with patients suffering from Chronic Kidney Disease. They work on a multidisciplinary team that includes nephrologists, nurse practitioners, dieticians, and social workers in Halifax as part of the Renal Program.

It's a lot of responsibility to be on one man's shoulders, but pharmacist Christopher Daley is responsible, along with his colleagues, for keeping about 800 of Nova Scotia's transplant patients alive and healthy. He is the Clinical Pharmacy Coordinator for the Multi-Organ Transplant Program (MOTP) in Atlantic Canada.